Why does the Indian National Team wear Blue?

“Why does the Indian team wear blue?” my son asks, as the match kicks off at the Hockey World Cup 2018.

“The Indian team always wears blue!” the other replies, all-knowingly.

The Indian team is always in BlueLes Bleus may refer famously to the French football team, but India is blue too!

“But why?” the first one asks, not satisfied with his brother’s superficial and dismissive answer.

“Because India is surrounded by the sea on three sides!” a plausible explanation is offered by the brother.

“Good guess!” I say.

The Indian Cricket Team are often called the Men in Blue

“Because Blue is the colour of many of the Indian gods!” he takes another shot referring to the images of Krishna, Rama and Shiva he has seen!

“Nice one!” I can’t help smiling.

“So…what is the answer?” they ask in unison, curious to get to the bottom of things.

I haven’t thought about it before. But to be honest, as a student of history, if I were asked to pick one colour to represent India, it would undoubtedly be blue.

“But WHY?” the question is repeated with much force, drawing me out of my thoughts.

And so I begin my story, narrating the tale about India’s tryst with Blue!

India Makes Blue

Blue has been for the longest time, one of the most common colours used to dye textiles. Even today much of the world dresses in blue.

Denim in various shades of Blue makes blue one of the most widely used dyes in the world

While in today’s day and age, a large number of dyes to colour textiles are synthetically made in factories, years ago natural dyes were required to colour fabrics.

Blue was one of those brilliant colours for which not many options were available. One of the only natural sources for the colour blue was the indigo plant.

Historically it was India that domesticated the use of this plant. The plant known as Indigofera tinctoria, is a shrub that was cultivated extensively in various parts of India since ancient times.

This plant is called Neel or Neelam in the north and Nilichettu in the south.

The leaves of the Indigo tinctoria are processed to produce the blue pigment and dye

Blue dye of various shades – deep blue to light blue – can be made from the leaves of this shrub.

As a result, back then, India was the primary supplier of indigo to the world. From Silks to Spices, Greeks and Romans were known to lap up the exotic products that came from the east as willing buyers. Indigo was one amongst the long list of eastern exotics.

It was the Greeks that gave the name Indikon to this dye, because of its association with India. By the time the term reached the English lexicon, it had become Indigo.

When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, he went to meet Gopal Krishna Gokhale, his political mentor and guru. Gokhale advised Gandhi to tour India’s villages in order to get to know the country intimately before he could begin taking an active part in the political struggle.

Not one to take his guru’s advice lightly, Gandhi spent a year travelling the length and breadth of India, in 3rd class railway coaches, meeting people who formed the soul of India.

In the dusty hot summer of April 1917, he made a journey to a place called Motihari in Bihar’s East Champaran. It was this movement, Gandhiji’s 1st satyagraha, that catapulted him to national fame. This little town in Bihar and the problems of its indigo farmers was to be a turning point in the history of India.

Motihari, a dusty little town in the Champaran District of Bihar, was to stage a turning point in the Indian National Movement

Only a few months ago at the 31st session of the Congress in Lucknow, a farmer from Champaran called Raj Kumar Shukla had met Gandhi and requested him to come to his village to understand the problems of the indigo tenant farmers there. At that time, as admitted by Gandhi himself, he had never heard of Champaran nor did he know where it was. He said that he had “hardly any notion of indigo plantations.”

He soon learned that the Britishers had imposed a system called tinkathia under which the farmers were forced to grow blue indigo in 3/20 parts of their land. If the farmers refused, they had to face heavy taxation. The British enforced the system brutally. As a result, the farmers were compelled to stop growing food crops and made to start growing indigo.

When Gandhi reached Motihari, news about his arrival spread far and wide. Hundreds had come to the railway station to see him. Even before he reached the village Jasullipati, where he intended to stay, he was served a notice from the district magistrate ordering him to leave by the next available train.

“If you leave the district now and promise not to return, the case against you will be withdrawn,” Gandhi was warned.

The District Administration of Champaran asked Gandhi to take the first available train and leave the district. Gandhi refused to obey.

Gandhi was unperturbed and challenged the police to arrest him. “I have come here to render humanitarian service to the people of this region. I shall not leave till I have helped these suffering people,” Gandhi replied.

The British soon realized Gandhi was too much of a force to contend with. They allowed him to remain and also instructed their officers to look into the suffering. of the indigo farmers.

Over the next few days Gandhi visited several villages and met many of the indigo peasants. He is said to have recorded the testimonies of up to 8000 indigo cultivators to understand their issues. He even laid the foundations of some schools in the district.

This also heralded a change in the Indian National Movement, which up until then had been a largely urban, upper-caste, upper-classes struggle. Until then, the Congress was mostly an elite organization – with members who did not represent the causes of rural India. This visit of Gandhi changed that.

Gandhi’s decision to visit the Indigo farmers in Champaran was a turning point in the Indian National Movement.

The British soon wizened up. An Inquiry Committee was set up to examine the problems of indigo farmers. A bill was soon presented before the Legislative Council. And within a year of Gandhi’s visit, the exploitative tinkathia system was abolished!

The power and sway of Gandhi was beginning to rise! Indigo had given Gandhi a jumpstart. And Mohandas Gandhi became Mahatma Gandhi.

Indigo Revolt

Now one more jump in time…but this time going backwards.

While we often hear about the mutiny of 1857, we do not hear much about other revolts and mutinies that took place against colonial rule in India.

One such revolt took place in Bengal in 1859 and was known as the Indigo Revolt or the Nil Vidroh.

It was one of the most large-scale peasant revolts of India where indigo peasants who had been forced to grow indigo instead of food, rebelled against the administration.

Many indigo depots were burnt and destroyed. On their part, the British suppressed the revolt, arresting and executing the indigo peasants.

Indigo plantations and depots were a common scene across India where Indian farmers were forced to grow indigo instead of foodcrops. The thirst for blue dye in Europe was insatiable.

As opposed to the Mutiny of 1857, this revolt is said to have been a nonviolent revolt, much before Gandhi was born.

The impact of this revolt was immediate. The government set up the Indigo Commission in 1860 to look into the problems of the indigo farmers.

In the commission report is found a line that tells the entire story “not a chest of indigo reached England without being stained with human blood.”

Not just diamonds, even dyes were stained with blood!

Fillip to Nationalistic Theatre

Indigo was also the basis for one of the earliest anti-colonial protests in the realm of art.

A play called Neel Darpan written by the Dinabandu Mitra in 1860 in Bengali, about the brutality of the British against indigo planters, quickly became one of the most vociferous voices of protest.

The Play was translated into English, published and circulated in England too. It attracted much attention from people in England who were shocked to learn about the brutality of their own countrymen.

It also attracted much criticism from the British administration and prompted them to ban nationalist theatre in India. Rev James Long who had translated and published the play in English was tried and punished.

Dinabandu Mitra’s Nil Darpan was a historic play, a first in many aspects. For those interested, the script is available in online archives.

Nil Darpan was to be one of the first of a string of plays that soon became the messengers of nationalistic fervour. Until the British clamped down heavily upon them by passing the Dramatic Performances Act, 1876, under which these kind of plays were banned as seditious.

Contrary to expectations however, the ban led to a flowering of theatre in India where writers came up with alternative plot ideas and used creative methods like hiding nationalist messages in mythological themes to overcome the ban.

Kichak Vadha by Krishnaji Khadilkar and a string of other plays were written by creative writers who used mythology as a conduit to pass on nationalistic messages. This was done to overcome the British ban on nationalistic theatre, prompted by the success of Nil Darpan.

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I used to argue for a living. Now I write!
India has been home and fascinates me no end. I love History - both natural and man-made. I enjoy engaging with children. I'm bitten by the travel bug. And I absolutely love Writing.
I tossed a bit of all these in together and India Travel Tales 4 Kids was born!
I also write on a variety of other subjects..for young and old, the serious kind and the profane! To check out my work visit www.mallikaiyer.com